Transcript of The morality of eating animals

yeah I'm sure that lettuces don't feel pain at all there's no evidence is just they could I'm also really quite dad for where the oysters can feel pain I mean okay so maybe they're animals and people might say well if you're prepared to read oysters you're not really a vegetarian or a vegan but I think though their nervous systems are very rudimentary and I would doubt that they could feel pain so I'm not really going to focus on that but but it seems to me and I'd really like to hear where you stand on this that when we're talking about vertebrates the particularly the animals we eat the pigs and cows and chickens and so on there's no doubt that they can feel pain and there's no doubt that they do feel pain in the way we rear them and produce them so that's why I don't think we can ethically justify eating them I mean I think really once we accept the sort of the Darwinian picture that we're not somehow a specially created species that's been you know got a god-given right to rule over the other animals we really have to move towards not buying all of these products that come from animals and that really embody the suffering that those animals experience yeah on the oyster question I would what I would say is that we don't need to grow lines and that we that we it's perfectly okay to talk about a continuum and if if oysters feel pain they probably feel a very small amount of pain whereas pigs probably feeling a great deal of pain and when when people say where do you draw the line I say why do you have to draw lines why don't you just say there is a continuum of capacity to feel pain there's also a continuum of capacity to feel the other things that we were talking about earlier like ability to foresee the future see what's coming to be believed and that kind of thing once again there is no need to draw line you can you can think of it just as we've got a continuum of all those things you can say we have a continuum of moral responsibility and our moral responsibility to us is quantitatively less than our moral responsibility to pigs which is quantitatively less than our moral responsibility to humans to the extent that humans differ in the in just the respects that you mention what those respects our intelligence doesn't seem to me to be relevant per se a capacity to feel pain is highly relevant and I suspect you're right that it's there's no evidence to suppose that it's any worse any more painful for a human to have a knife thrown through his throat or something than than for a pig so the only justification I can think of for eating these and I confess that I do eat meat is the was the one you raised earlier which is the difference in ability to know what's coming ability to feel fear ability to feel bereaved and things like that and I think you're almost certainly right that although the position I've just laid out would be defensible if the animals were killed without the slightest idea of what's going to happen if they were going that's sort of the the proverbial bullet in the back of the neck when you're not looking of course that doesn't wait the way it happens the way they're kept in factory farms and the way they're herded into slaughterhouses I don't know much about it but I suspect it's unconscionable I think it is and in a way I do think I have to say if you do eat meat I think you have a responsibility to know something about it because usually you don't want to support something which you know maybe not only just sort of wrong slightly about you know something causing really serious and prolonged suffering to beings who you agree can't morally so I don't think we can just sort of turn our heads and say you know please don't tell me about it that that's too much like but maybe the good Germans who want to know what was happening for those Jews who you're a much more moral person than I am and I have to have to say that